According to The CNN Exit Polls, 23% of gay/lesbian/bisexual voters voted for Bush. A little simple math says that over 1 million gays voted for Bush in this election. If all of them had voted for Kerry, it wouldn't have turned the election, but it certainly would have made things a lot closer.
But on another level, what exactly were they thinking? The Republican party doesn't stand for fiscal discipline anymore. They don't want to stop the government from intruding in your private life. They seem to think the Constitution is a nuisance. And above all, if you're gay, they want to make sure that you become a second-class citizen, at best. What values does any gay person share with the Republicans?
If you were a gay Bush backer, you should know that Bush was put over the top in this election by a bunch of rabid homophobes. Here's an e-mail from one of them to Andrew Sullivan:
"I wonder if you noticed that yesterday all eleven states that considered the question of gay marriage voted to ban it. ALL ELEVEN. I think this sends a very clear message -- true Americans do not like your kind of homosexual deviants in our country, and we will not tolerate your radical pro-gay agenda trying to force our children to adopt your homosexual lifestyle. You should be EXTREMELY GRATEFUL that we even let you write a very public and influential blog, instead of suppressing your treasonous views (as I would prefer). But I'm sure someone like yourself would consider me just an "extremist" that you don't need to worry about. Well you are wrong -- I'm not just an extremist, I am a real American, and you should be worried because eleven states yesterday proved that there are millions more just like me who will not let you impose your radical agenda on our country."
Now explain to me again how whatever you agreed with Bush on was worth siding with these lunatics?
8 comments:
This might be a shot in the dark but, most gays I know are doing well financially. Could tax breaks be part of the deal?
Also remember that being gay is only one characteristic of a very large and varied population. How does a gay member of the IRA vote? How about a gay Catholic who is stronly anti-abortion? How about the gay who is still in the closet?
I have gay friends who don't really care much about "gay" issues, just like there are many blacks that don't particularly care about marching with Jessie Jackson or women who want to burn their bras. My one friend calls herself a "bad" lesbian because she just doesn't follow that kind of activism.
People vote against their own best interests all the time. I read a report where something like 74% of Bush supporters not only thought he supported the Kyoto Treaty, but they themselves supported it. They thought he, like them, supported the ICC! The report concluded that Kerry supporters not only knew where their own candidate stood on the issues, but they knew where Bush stood. His supporters demonstrated a total lack of knowledge about either candidate. 6 months of campaign coverage, wall to wall 24 hour news channels, and ignorace reigns. That having been said, I am still stunned that 59.5 million, mostly heterosexuals, voted for Bush considering the current national crisis. Gee, what could they have been thinking?
I'm afraid that half of those 59 million were thinking how much they hate Gay people. The other half were voting out of combination of relex, greed and nationalism. Without the hatred of Gays, Bush loses in a landslide.
The secular conservatives need to seriously consider who they owe for their electoral victory! And Gay Republicans need to consider how many of their rights are for sale for how big a tax cut.
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/deanfordnc
Howard Dean for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee
By Jason Gooljar
It was a solemn day the crowd gathered around the stage where the candidate was to give his concession. Smiles were on the faces of some, while tears fell from the cheeks of others. Rhythmic applause could be heard erupting from the people all in unison. No, this was not the election night of November 2nd , 2004. This was Howard Dean back in the winter about to end his primary bid. For some this moment can now be looked back on as the day we really lost the presidency to our own party.
It has been said "When you trade your values for the hope of winning, you end up losing and having no values -- so you keep losing." The truth has never been more clear than it is now. We must strengthen the newly found spinal transplant of the Democratic Party. We must now take a stand with our democratic values in tow. First, I'll tell you what we should not stand for anymore. We can no longer be a party who has to move to the center. The right has never had to do it and neither should we. We can no longer be a party who is beholden to special interests. No more of the big money donors, there is a better way. Raise the money from the grassroots.
We need real campaign finance reform. We need to be the party of inclusion and the party of the poor and the middle class. We need to go to middle America and talk to them about what we stand for. We need to show them that we truly have their interests at heart. We need to go to the evangelical Christians and have a real discussion about America. We need to have a real discussion of religion in America. We need to re frame the debate from our perspective and not reinforce the conservative frames already in place.
When Goldwater lost, his backers did not give up. Goldwater actually lost badly. We have not been greatly defeated like they were. It took them forty years to build the machine they have in place now. We let them do it while we snickered at them and laughed at them for being extremists who would never hold power. They continued to work and they continued to organize. They started winning locally at the state level throughout the middle states and then they went national. They threw the moderate republicans out in favor of the new conservatives. There is much to learn from our opponents indeed.
As we rebuild our party we must keep some things in mind. The neo conservatives do not have absolute power. There were millions of Americans who voted against this President. We still have the power, you still have the power. We as the progressive movement can no longer be afraid of losing. In order to win you must loose. As long as you keep your values when you loose you can continue to fight on. If you give them up you have nothing. Either we as the democratic party stand for something or we stand for nothing at all. After all why vote for a right wing lite party when you can vote for the real thing as middle America did.
Terry McAuliffe's strategy had major flaws in my opinion. The tactic of a shorter primary in my opinion was not a good idea. We could have used the time to truly prepare our national agenda. We could have used that time to allow our democratic ideals to take forefront in the media. Chairman Mcauliffe is an incredible fund raiser this has been said but he lacks the vision to take this party in the direction it has to go. It has also been said that his agenda did not truly involve the south.
With all of this being said I'm asking the people who voted against this President to ask the DNC to elect former Governor Howard Dean as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Howard Dean has a clear vision of where this party needs to be headed. We need his guidance to achieve our goals as a progressive movement. If we loose in the interim if we stay together as a movement we can shoulder the losses and eventually trumpet the wins. I'm asking for the people to write letters to the media and call elected officials in the democratic party to push for election of Howard Dean as the new chairman of the DNC.
I expected this. Once again, the left wing of the Party is declaring that reason the Democrats lost by 1% is that they were too centrist. "If only" they say, "the Democratic party had been more faithful to its core ideals" (by which they mean move to the left)"then we would have won." (and let's be honest here, there is significant overlap between the "Deaniacs" of 2004 and the "Nader Raiders" of 2000)
What does Dean bring to the table? Is he a strategic mastermind? He got his clock cleaned in the Democratic primaries! Why should we think he would do better nationally?
Bringing in Dean would be purely an idoelogical statement. An announcement to the world that Democratic party is responding to narrow defeat with a strong turn to the left.
The Democratic party turned out its base in record numbers in 2004. The problem was NOT failure to energize the base. The problem was failure to convince people who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate that the Democratic party is not a threat to them. Picking Dean as DNC Chair will convince those people once and for all that the Democratic party is a threat.
I don't know, USWest. If a political party wanted to introduce a Constitutional amendment relegating mathematicians to second-class citizens, I don't think I'd be voting for them. But maybe that's just me.
There are a lot of people who want to do house cleaning in the Democratic party. I can understand the frustration, but let's let cooler head prevail first, right?
Is there any gender breakdown on this statistic? None of my lesbian/bi friends were anywhere near voting for Bush (though several attempted to explain to my why voting for Nader was a good idea).
-Seventh Sister
Hi, 7-S. I couldn't find a gender breakdown of the gbl vote. By the way, the LA Times exit poll as Bush getting 17% of the gay vote. That's still too high in my opinion, but more reasonable.
Keep in mind that Kerry announced his opposition to gay marriage. Also, some uninformed people think he "outed" Mary Cheney. So if 83% of gay Americans got it right, that's not so bad.
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